


Play With Fire

by meditationonbaal



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-21 11:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12456752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meditationonbaal/pseuds/meditationonbaal
Summary: For now just pondering drabbles of moments with Audrey Horne and Dale Cooper both apart and together. May turn into something else as it goes along. For now it is rated teen but may tumble into the explicit given enough time.





	1. Visions of Your Reality

**A/N: This will be a compilation of moments about Audrey and Dale both apart and together. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking the open-ended nature of their relationship in the original series left many wanting. Sometimes I prefer when show/film writers do this as it provides me fodder for just such an occasion as writing these drabbles. Some of these drabbles will be rewrites of moments in the show, additional or behind the scenes events, or a completely revisionary telling of the ending of season 2. Don’t know where this compilation is going to go, so I’m leaving the summary and rating open-ended. The title of the compilation comes from the Stones song ‘Play with Fire’. Each chapter will have a song attached to it. I highly recommend listening to the song to get a feel for the tone of the piece. This first piece is called Visions of your Reality by Ultimate Spinach. The ending of the piece goes into ‘It was a very good year’ by Frank Sinatra. The underage warning was given for just this chapter because it deals with some moments involving minors, but nothing too explicit. I hope you all enjoy and would much appreciate any feedback!**

**Visions of Your Reality**

The virulent red EKG perpetuates itself across the walls from the trophy case to the locker rooms, and she spent the last four years haunted by each singular punctuation of some vague representation of life. Each frozen heartbeat serves as a constant reminder she is just the same, a pulse that goes nowhere, just loops back on itself, and she knows it each time she changes her shoes at the lockers or sneaks a cigarette into the girl’s bathroom. She feels her own pulse suspended with it as she leans against the row of leaky sinks and stares down that sudden but silent exclamation of vitality. She is a girl with plans but her plans always seem to go nowhere, circling round and round with the heartbeat. They just circle back to this awful square one of sterile halls with nothing but that jagged red line frozen in time. All her plans, her aspirations, her schemes loop back on themselves with perfect predictability and she is left here in this teenage wasteland sneaking another cigarette, succumbing to another fruitless rebellion no one sees, no one cares.

She knows how special she is and finds it funny no one else seems to think so. Being pretty is easy for her and she can work her charms effortlessly on the boys and the men to get what she wants, but it doesn’t mean anything. She could be anyone to them. It’s not her they want.

Not like Laura. But she is just like Laura. Only – only Laura lets them want her, she gives in to their wants, lets herself be used. Audrey would never let herself be used, would never succumb to the machinations or manipulations of others even if she was really the one pulling all the strings. No one gets even the belief they got the best of Audrey Horne.

Audrey was barely edging into pubescence when she discovered her ability to subdue men with only a coy smile. Perhaps it started there, the persistent dissatisfaction with all things related to romance and affection. Nothing in those areas of her life ever quite lived up to her expectations and these few and far between occurrences only served to exile her further. She thought these were her first steps into womanhood but somehow her isolation grew.

She knows now she didn’t do things the right way. Was there a right way? While preteen Donna and Laura were out skinny dipping and seducing boys, Audrey took another tack, albeit one she had not initially intended. She wondered at the time if that was what was expected of her. Was she supposed to troll the roadhouse with twenty somethings and strip down to her skivvies groping for attention?

Her father always had some investor or contractor passing through the hotel. She cannot remember a time when her father was not engaged in fervent conference calls or making backroom deals, all in the name of profit. Never in the name of family. Her father knew his rolodex contacts better than he knew his children’s birthdays. She was sure he kept his lawyers in better confidence and held them in higher esteem than his own wife.

There was this one, this lawyer Charles Nickleby who liked to tell her campy jokes and bring her caramels from business trips with her father. She liked Charlie in the way young girls like nice older men who are not their negligent fathers, and she practiced flirting with him like young girls do with men when they don’t know what they are doing quite yet. If Audrey knew better she would have realized men should not entertain such flirtations. Normally older men discourage those sorts of attentions. Charlie laughed or blushed or returned the sentiments and sent Audrey’s mind sprawling. At first Charlie placed his hand on her shoulder, a harmless show of affection. He did this on more than one occasion in front of her father and drew no criticisms. In time that hand migrated farther south, inching its way towards some impropriety Audrey could not have anticipated, exploiting her naivete. Charlie started making excuses to touch her. A stray piece of lint on the front of her blouse, dirt on her skirt bottom, shoelaces untied.

While her father argued with a contractor over the phone, Charlie laid his hand on her thigh. She could feel the heat from his palm through the wool fabric of her plaid skirt and never once broke her gaze from her father. Benjamin Horne blindly spitting angry into the receiver as Charlie’s hand tested the waters ever deeper, Audrey could only stare in disbelief at her father.

Her first kiss is with Bobby Briggs during a game of seven minutes in heaven. He sneaks his hand up her shirt and Audrey doesn’t feel a damn thing. She rolls her eyes and shoves him back into a pile of old coats. She wonders if she will always be nothing but a frozen heartbeat plastered to the walls as she walks home alone barefoot with her saddle shoes dangling from two careless fingers. She breathes frost into the night air and realizes how hot she is inside.

Her father catches a fourteen-year-old Audrey letting Charlie Nickleby molest her on the chesterfield in his office. He fires Nickleby on the spot with a swift kick to the rear on the way out. He asks her what she was thinking as she buttons up her blouse. All she could think to say was, “I didn’t think you’d mind.” He never seemed to mind before when Nickleby was easing his skeevy fingers into the dip between her legs while Ben Horne lit another cigar and cackled into the phone’s receiver.

At fifteen years old, Audrey draws investor Mr. Noriega through the secret door to her father’s office. Her rear crumples the contract on her father’s desk as Noriega hefts her up onto the ink blotter. He settles his hips between her legs just beginning to fill out and curve in all the right ways. Noriega smells like alcoholic’s aftershave but Audrey doesn’t mind because he has that gorgeous black hair slicked back and that sharp camel suitcoat. As he buries his face into her neck, she realizes none of these men ever ask her age. She also realizes her neck is one of her most inviting features and closes her eyes with a hum. The hum breaks into a secret smile when her father comes waltzing in, snapping the lights on, fully expecting to wrap up the contracts only to find them buckling under Audrey’s bottom as Noriega smears her red lipstick. The funny thing is Ben Horne no longer seems surprised. The funnier thing is he never seemed all that surprised in the beginning. Audrey sits on the chesterfield, watches Noriega and Horne sign the contracts and shake hands. Noriega buttons his camelhair coat onehanded and flies from the office without so much as a glance her way.

Ben Horne lifts the contract in front of his face with both hands and then snaps the back of his hand against it, his sneering grin bent around the newly lit cigar as he savors all the zeros. When he remembers Audrey still perched on the sofa, he tells her, “Good work.”

Audrey slips behind one of the many hidden doors at the Great Northern to steal a moment of reprieve. The Big Band plays Sinatra on a circuit and she is so tired of Frank, exhausted with smiling, irritated with all those wandering hands. Her father trying to seal the deal for his new golf course with shameless fawning while his business partners Thurmond and Terrence and Wade feel her up on the dance floor. Her father dancing with Laura for the fifth time that night. Audrey spins and spins and spins with a new face every time and looks over to see Laura in her father’s arms, Laura under her father’s adoring gaze, Laura laughing at his offkey crooning. At sixteen Audrey tires of being used by all the wrong people.

She slides a cigarette from the pack she lifted out of what’s his name’s suit pocket and strikes a Great Northern match that briefly lights up the darkness of her hiding place. After she lights the cigarette, she holds the match between thumb and forefinger, watches the flame ever so slowly and surely consume the thin cardboard. She watches that tiny fire until it pricks at her fingertips and drops the match. It goes out before it hits the ground. Audrey exhales smoke in the darkness, watches the embers curl briefly before dissipating after each inhale. She smokes until the heat licks at the filter. Without ceremony, she lets the cigarette fall from her lips to the ground at her feet.

She hears Frank reminiscing about enjoying the girls through the years. There would always be more girls, new girls, girls more willing and exciting than the last. She realizes that even though her father loves Laura, that all the boys and men love Laura, there is no such thing as fidelity. It didn’t take much to get Bobby Briggs to kiss her. Charlie entertained his own fantasies about Laura at the same time he was sniffing at Audrey’s skirts. Even her father chased each fresh piece of ass that floated through the lobby of the Great Northern. Laura was not the end all be all.

Audrey grinds her heel into the cigarette ember barely glowing, snuffs it out. She will be different. Laura settles. Donna settles. All the girls settle. Audrey will be different. She would never settle for anything less than absolute love. She would never accept anyone less than perfect. She was convinced there would be someone who fit the bill. The Bobby Briggs’ and Charles Nicklebys of the world were a dime a dozen and Audrey was a rara avis deserving a good year.

People think Laura is going places, a moving heartbeat, bold and strong and so kind, and she thinks about that Hemingway quote where the world breaks everyone. Those is doesn’t break it kills. It kills the very good, brave, and kind. If you are none of these things you can be sure it will kill you, too – though there will be no special hurry. So when Laura dies, everyone can say it was because she was ultimately good and that is the nature of the world. But she knows better and they should, too. Laura’s heartbeat was just as frozen as hers but now forever. She still has time. She just needs to pick her moment.


	2. Mary Mary So Contrary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Here is a second one. The song is Mary Mary So Contrary by Can. I’ll admit it is starting to seem easier to write from Audrey’s point of view. I hope you all enjoy this next installment! Perhaps this will seem less like an incoherent set of drabbles and proceed like it has some semblance of a plot. Not sure yet. Any feedback is much appreciated!

**Mary Mary So Contrary by Can**

 

It doesn’t hit nearly as close to home as expected and she worries briefly about that. Traversing the gap between her feelings and the feelings of others was never her strong suit, which she freely admits to. She can hear Donna sobbing a few rows back and the snap of a pencil halved, but nothing momentous rises in her chest, no crushing weight from loss or grief. She thinks for a moment the teacher didn’t have to say anything before the dams broke in Donna. In that way Donna’s thoughts and her own coalesce – Laura was dead and her death was unsurprising to them both. Perhaps it is this lack of surprise that leaves her feeling blank. A pernicious someone whispers in the back of her mind, what took so long? Audrey smothers an awful smile.

 

She hears desk legs scratch along the linoleum as several girls surround the weeping Prima Donna and then the crackle of the PA system as Principal Wolchezk announces the obvious. The following moment of silence is punctuated only by wet hiccups and the sound of James Hurley flying from the classroom. Audrey rests her chin on interlaced fingers and studies the stricken face of Mrs. Honeycutt the homeroom teacher for the remainder of the prescribed silence.

 

Honeycutt postpones the day’s pop quiz which Audrey takes as a cue she can go. The rest of the students linger in the hallway, trudging around in a collective daze, while she changes back into her saddle shoes at her locker. She laments the leather is still warm from when she switched pairs only a little while ago.

 

She waits behind a line of several students to use the phone in the administration office to beckon her driver back, who must have just arrived back at the hotel. As she shifts her books to the other hip she notices Bobby Briggs being escorted by a deputy out the front doors to the school, submitting him to a walk of shame for all the students to digest. Digest they do with not a little suspicion or bitterness. While she waits to use the phone, her mind leaps onto that suspicion for inspection, entertains the possibility Bobby Briggs could kill someone. Volatile, unpredictable, opportunistic Bobby naturally drawn to risks and mischiefs much like herself. To think Bobby Briggs was capable of murder was to believe in her own capability to commit just the same. Again her thoughts turn worrisome. She sifts through possible scenarios where Bobby would end with killing Laura while the line ever surely moves.

 

The student before her finishes his conversation with a choked sob and he folds in on himself while he steals out of the administration office. He leaves the phone off the hook on the front desk. Audrey lifts the receiver to her ear and listens to a gruff voice complain about having to leave work, demands the student suck it up, makes a comment about teen draftees in Nam. Audrey drops the receiver unceremoniously onto the hook, drawing an eye from the receptionist. She smiles coy and lifts it back up to her ear, dials the number for the Great Northern, and checks her manicure while the phone rings. She concludes that while she takes great pleasure in stirring the pot, she knows herself incapable of enacting mortal harm on anyone unless provoked. This thought satisfies her as the concierge picks up on the fourth ring.

 

* * *

 

 

Audrey never had much of a taste for coffee, acrid and bitter in most cases even when doctored up with cream and sugar. Although there was something comforting about a cup of coffee black. Not for the taste but the aesthetic, she reasoned. The somehow rousing smell of the beans, the warmth of the porcelain, and the seemingly depthless black like staring into a magic eight ball waiting expectantly for some omen, some inauspicious flicker of fate. She thinks about tumbling into that dark, wonders what will be waiting at the bottom.

 

The concierge Julie taps at the calculator and shuffles some papers around, breaking Audrey’s concentration on the styrofoam cup. She can hear the distant drone of the Norwegian translator from around the corner. One of the hotel managers Bob comes striding up to the concierge’s desk and leans in real close to Julie as if to impart something super secret. When he orders Julie to keep Laura’s death a secret from the Norwegians, Audrey hears her father’s voice instead. It doesn’t take much, Audrey thinks. One moment she feels just fine, near sane and level and comfortable inside her imagination. The hot-cold starts to build up on her skin, raising discomfiting gooseflesh on her forearms. She used to think it was fear, that feeling like ice left on bare skin too long. Now she knows it better. Just how far does the apple fall from the tree?

 

Audrey cannot help the sarcasm saturating her tone as she mocks the retreating Bob. Julie side eyes Audrey who manipulates the chewed up number two pencil she was using to finish her physics homework. Audrey stares at the styrofoam cup carrying out its duty to hold securely the steaming black coffee. Millions of little styrofoam atoms held together to prevent the coffee’s escape. How much human energy went into containing that chaos, she thinks. But, the world inevitably plummets back into disorder.

 

Audrey positions the point of the pencil next to the vulnerable styrofoam, slips it in real slow, and queries Julie about what she would do. How would she try to contain the chaos? Why would she try? Audrey knows what comes next. She reasons the diameter of the pencil is about the width of her pinky finger. If Julie is smart, she will plug the hole with her finger like the little boy with the leaking dyke. But, she will run the risk of scalding her poor pinky finger in the process, all in the goal of reigning in chaos. If Julie is smarter, she will allow the coffee to spill everywhere and stop Audrey from doing something worse. Audrey thinks sometimes you need to allow a little chaos in the pursuit of preventing a greater unraveling. But, Julie is not Audrey. Julie implores Audrey not to. Tongue in cheek, Audrey tugs the pencil from the styrofoam and delights in all that enigmatic black pouring from one tiny hole. Julie panics and sputters so predictably that Audrey grins, floats off with a harmless comment about perusing the dregs of the Norwegian smorgasbord. Julie warns her not to go in there, desperately sopping up the soggy papers on her desk, picking her calculator out of a murky brown puddle.  

 

She glides on the silent soles of her saddle shoes towards the absurd spread set up for the benefit of the lockstep cheese eaters gathered in the center of the hall. Audrey pretends to contemplate the gouda and half-eaten black forest ham. Perhaps another mug of coffee as black as the devil’s southerly pucker. She raises her eyebrows at this and swivels on her soles away from the buffet table, meanders along the edge of the wall to loiter by the entrance.

 

Audrey wants to snicker when their heads swivel in tandem like obedient sheep to ogle the pretty lamb that wandered into their midst. It’s not difficult, the false anxiety and lamentation, reciting the gory details of Laura’s demise. She sees Sven’s face break in horror, overlays that alarm over her father’s features. She prepares her abject pout, wrings her hands behind her back and casts a forlorn gaze aside. The Norwegian sheep have no words as Audrey exits stage right, passes Julie’s desk, condemns her soaked physics homework to the trash heap. Sometimes you need to invite a little chaos in to get at the true unraveling, she thinks as she hears briefcases snapping shut and loafers shuffling across the hardwood. Fervent whispers in an unfamiliar language eventually evolve into yelling as the translator seems at a loss with what to do. Julie abandons her soggy desk to question the translator as investor after investor storms past her.

 

Audrey weaves between the pillars in the lobby, waiting patiently for every last one of the Norwegians to file on out the double doors to the Great Northern. Julie panics and rings the reception bell over and over, warning the guests of the flight of the investing Valkyries. Audrey spins herself around one of the pillars, peeks around the side as her father chases down Sven by valet. The heated exchange of words, her father grabbing the flustered and frightened Scandi who rips out of his hold, stuffs himself into his car and orders the chauffer to peel off the curb, leaving her father with nothing but the pungent smell of burning rubber.

 

Audrey bites her lip to keep from giggling too loud, bounces on her toes with satisfaction. How she just thrives on knocking down Ben Horne’s dominoes.

 

* * *

 

 

She flips the switch to watch the hundreds of twinkling lights light up the hidey hole she has carved out for herself. Every day is Christmas in this room. Every night is a star-filled in this room. She ignores her protesting stomach as she crouches in the corner to watch the tiny lights twinkle asynchronously like so many stars. She thinks about when she stares up at the real night sky and watches a star disappear, she wonders if she just watched it die. She knows it takes millions of years for that light to reach her eye, but there is still this unidentifiable tug in her chest when she watches that light flicker and fade and finally disappear. But here in this room the stars never die, not while she is here. The stars only come alive when she is here.

 

Not even her father knows about this one servant’s closet. It never showed up on any of the floor plans. And this is where she goes to avoid family dinner. Why should she have to listen to her father berate her for that afternoon’s shenanigans? It didn’t take much. The Norwegians had weak stomachs.

 

Audrey reaches up above her to retrieve the pack of cigarettes she has hidden on a wall stud. She taps the pack but realizes its empty when her fingers find no purchase. Her hand contracts abruptly, crushing the pack in her palm. She wonders if she is smoking too much lately. It wouldn’t do any good to build up an addiction. She didn’t smoke because she was addicted. She smoked for the kinesthetic fixation, obsessively flicking the ash, manipulating the cigarette between her fingers, and for those brief moments while the cigarette dwindled where she didn’t have to think so much, where her thoughts aligned near perfectly as the nicotine eased through her bloodstream. She liked the way smoking made her feel, young and invulnerable, something she felt entitled to feel, if only for a little while.

 

She looks down at the pack in her hand, the thin cardboard caved in, the logo cracking and peeling. There are worse addictions, she knows.

 

Audrey pushes through into the girls’ bathroom hoping for a minute alone when she spies black brogues under one of the stall doors. She hears a loud sniffing followed by a long exhale. Then, the toilet flushes. Audrey turns around to look at herself in the mirror, pretends to tame a few fly-aways, smooth her finger nail under her bottom lip to even out her lipstick. She is checking her teeth for lipstick when the stall door swings open for the homecoming queen.

 

Laura tucks her makeup bag into her messenger bag and teeters out of the bathroom stall heel to toe towards the line of sinks. She starts to wash her hands when she notices Audrey side eyeing her. Audrey notes that Laura has to lean her hips against the counter to keep herself standing. Laura turns to stare back, her gaze falling to the pack of cigarettes on the shelf below the mirror where Audrey inspects her makeup. She smiles like Audrey is so predictable.

 

“Did you want some?” Laura offers with a derisive sneer, faking to reach into her bag.

 

Audrey stands up straight and grabs the pack of cigarettes from the shelf, realizes it is empty save for a little pink Bic lighter. “No thanks.” Audrey crumples the empty cigarette pack in her hand. “Not for me.”

 

“Oh, I forgot,” Laura says like an oops and smiles smug. “How’s it feel, Audrey? All alone up on that shelf, still in the box.” Laura wipes the back of her hand under her nose and smears red up across her cheek. When she notices the blood on her hand she chuckles sadly. Audrey watches Laura return to the bathroom stall to wrap toilet paper around her hand and hold it under her nose. Once the bleeding stops Laura nonchalantly tosses the bloody tissue into the sink. “Catch you later, gator.”

 

Audrey tossed the pack with the pink Bic lighter into the bathroom trash and didn’t smoke another cigarette for two weeks.

 

Now, she tosses the empty pack at the entrance to her hiding spot, snaps her fingers in an imitation of flicking the ash from the tip of the cigarette. Behind her the wall trembles a little when someone closes their room door a bit carelessly. The guest starts talking but she never hears a second voice respond. Audrey snickers to herself, listening to some fool talk to themselves in their hotel room during the zero hour. As she listens closer, she realizes they are talking to someone who is either not there or refuses to contribute to the conversation. 

 

“Diane, I have taken up whittling again. As you know I haven’t engaged in this hobby since my days in the Boy Scouts, but today I found the time and setting to finish a simple whistle using some of that fantastic smelling Douglas fir wood. Here, let me demonstrate.” Audrey hears several succinct toots in succession and laughs out loud, forces herself to smother it quickly in case anyone hears. The man continues, “Somehow this hobby of whittling seems appropriate for a town like this. It’s a rare thing, Diane, in this day and age. A town, for what it’s worth, where the community is so tightly interconnected and conscious of one another. No one is faceless here. It’s refreshing. Refreshing enough I have taken up whittling again.” He follows that up with another three toots on the whistle. “Diane, it’s nearly one in the morning. I will be signing off shortly. Before I go, please remember to send me my favorite mug. I accidentally left it on my desk.”


	3. Dance of the Dream Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The song is Dance of the Dream Man by Angelo Badalamenti followed by Audrey's Dance. When I saw Angelo Badalamenti was doing the score for Twin Peaks, I instantly thought of City of Lost Children (1995). His score for that film was also fantastically surreal and dreamlike, like being lulled into the good kind of nightmare, the ones that play off the worst parts of you, parts you don't mind playing with even if only in dreams. Sorry, this is a ramble. I guess this ties into how I see Audrey, how I envied her character a little. She has no qualms with the darker parts of her, seems perfectly comfortable with them. Again, I hope you all enjoy this next installment and any and all feedback is much appreciated!

Audrey tiptoes around the receptionist’s desk where the concierge Julie passes orders over the phone. Her fingers slide along the polished top, her fingernails catching every crack and divot, her gaze aimless as it wanders about the lobby. One of the receptionists sidles up to Julie, who hangs up the phone.

 

“Did you hear?” The receptionist, Mia or Tia or something, asks Julie, leaning back against the counter with her back to Audrey.

 

Julie bites. “What?” She continues to make notes from her phone call, her pencil scratching and scratching on the yellow legal pad. Audrey thinks it sounds a little like a kitten scratching at a door post or like errant branches against her bedroom window.  

 

“They had to call in the FBI for the Palmer murder. Apparently, the Pulaski girl crossed state lines,” the receptionist relays to Julie.

 

“Seems like overkill for one murder,” Julie reasons, tapping the pencil eraser against the paper. “He is staying with us.”

 

The receptionist balks. “Here?”

 

Audrey starts to slink away from the reception desk, catching Julie’s eye for the first time. Audrey misses the ugly look the concierge sends her way.

 

Her heart just isn’t in it for family breakfast this morning. Audrey’s mother frequently misses breakfast. Her mother frequently misses lunch. Courtesy of mother’s little helper at the bottom of an amber glass bottle. Her father might still be smarting over her antics from yesterday. And poor Johnny never reacts well to familial tensions.

 

She ambles heel-toe towards the Timber Room, using the wall for balance. She woke up later than she usually does, because she spent too much time in the room of stars listening to that fool happily go on and on until he finally shuffled into bed. Watching the stars twinkle and listening to him ramble on about his theories and imaginations. As she rounds the corner towards the morning breakfast rush, she hears one voice rise above the others, recognizes it immediately and wants to giggle. She’s excited to see who it is, wants to put a face to that eccentric voice. She likes collecting the eccentricities of others, makes it a hobby in a town like Twin Peaks where eccentricities are not uncommon.

 

She feels it like a knot in the space just below her sternum, a sudden tension in her thighs, a tickling in her belly, and then her head goes fuzzy all at once. She has felt each of these things before but all on separate occasions, never simultaneously, never like a wave. It makes her think about going to the beach when she was very little, her father holding her hand as she avidly watched the waves go in and out, the sea foaming about her tiny feet, that unsettling feeling as the sand moved under her soles like she was about to fall, and then abruptly an unanticipated wave came crashing over her head. If her father had not had a hold of her, she was sure she would have been swept out to sea. This time there is no one to hold her hand as she is washed out with the tide.

 

Watching him order what he wants to a perfect T, an instant flush erupts from the base of her collarbone to her chin, and she spreads her fingers along her neck to feel the heat there. She is tumbling in the waves as she saunters over, unconscious of her hips moving side to side, her vision so narrowed that the roar of the breakfast crowd dims to a dull murmuring. And listening to him stumble into unintended innuendo as his gaze falls on her, Audrey’s heart skips into her throat and her smile feels like it will split her face. 

 

She introduces herself, takes the opportunity to get a better look at him. Her palms start to itch, and it reminds her of that superstition, money coming in on the right, money going out on the left. She wonders if it can be applied to love and what it means if both her palms itch. She assumes if she touches him the itching will go away, figures it is all the reason she needs. Silly yet authoritative, eccentric yet well put together, aware and rational and too handsome for his own good. No, this one is _juuust_ right, Audrey thinks.

 

“Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent Dale Cooper,” he introduces, standing up like a perfect gentleman.

 

“Can I sit here?” Audrey tests the waters, hoping he will notice there are not any other free seats in the dining room, somehow knowing he would never say no, not this one.

 

He realizes in an instant she must be the daughter of Benjamin Horne, the owner of this very dining hall, and she can sit wherever she’d like, but he would not mind her sitting with him. It would be his pleasure, and the way he says it makes her stomach flip.

 

“You’re here investigating the murder of Laura Palmer,” she concludes.

 

“Were you friends with Laura Palmer?” He defaults so seamlessly to the role of special agent at the mention of the case that Audrey deflates a little.

 

“Not exactly,” she tells him. “Laura tutored my older brother Johnny three times a week. Johnny’s 27 and he’s in the third grade. He’s got emotional problems; it runs in the family.” She segues offhand, brandishing her right hand towards him. “Do you like my ring?”

 

Before he can fully process her information, he glances down at the ring, her hand, her delicate wrist, pale pink palms. Unthinking he takes her hand to inspect the ring on her flawlessly manicured middle finger, notes the respectably sized diamond inset in a simple silver band. He can feel how unused her hands are, barely a callus or a scar. “Very nice,” he comments, releases her hand.

 

Audrey brings her hands together in front of her, absentmindedly moves the ring around her finger. “You know sometimes I get so flushed,” she admits, unable to help herself. “It’s interesting. Do your palms ever itch?”

 

He seems taken aback, a little dumbfounded. His mind is smoky, all his morning’s meditation for naught. He thinks, where there is smoke there is fire. Dale studies the pattern of trees on her shirt, the silhouettes of spindly two and three-year-old trees painted across her blouse like young sycamores, a tree that makes him think of childhood. He gets lost in those woods. She clouds his thinking in all her perfect quirkiness, and he speculates it may be a ruse, but he cannot seem to find his cloak of wariness or his glasses of objectivity. She raided his self-awareness toolbox before she even took a seat, he realizes. He instantly recognizes his palms also itch.

 

“Would you like some coffee?” he offers, about to reach for the carafe. “It’s very good here.” Dale back tracks in his head. Of course she would know the coffee was good in her family’s hotel.

 

Audrey fiddles with the empty porcelain mug in front of her. “That’s because Trudy made it this morning,” she explains. “Instant intuition is part of your job, huh.”

 

He smiles noncommittally. There is no logical transition in her dialogue, Dale thinks. She says the first thing that pops into her head, no filter included.

 

“So what’s your intuition say about me, Agent Cooper?”

 

Impulsive. Unpredictable. Imaginative. Prone to jealousy. The last one sticks out but he doesn’t say it aloud. “Who gave you that ring?” He wants to catch her off guard, too, bring them back into navigable territory for him.

 

She taps her fingers against the empty porcelain mug so the ring makes a clinking tinny sound. “My father gave it to me,” she answers without hesitation. Audrey feels perturbed by how blindly she follows his line of questioning; her brow furrows at that. Where did all her self-control go? “My father was crazy about Laura. He gave her a pony when she was nine, but he let her father say it was from him. It’s name was Troy.”

 

“What do you mean your father was crazy about her?” Dale watches her stare intently into the empty mug, her brow knitted, and he wants to reach over and smooth it out. He wants to know what she is thinking.

 

Something shifts in her demeanor like a switch flipped. She looks up at him, those blue eyes electric under her expressive eyebrows, deviously slanted. She smiles like the cat that ate the canary, a near Cheshire-type smile that unsettles him, and when she opens her mouth, he expects her to spill yellow feathers. Instead, “Everybody was crazy about Laura Palmer, Special Agent Dale Cooper.”

 

* * *

 

She lifts the needle and places it so delicately on the precise groove where the song starts. She has this record memorized, each winding, twisting turn of the clarinet like moving through dim hallways, each bleat of the saxophone like an expletive. All she needs is a moment where there is nothing but the wavering of the flute and the pitter patter of the brush scrape on the cymbal. She allows the meandering melody to hold her up like a puppet dangling on a string.

 

This music is like an almost kiss, a slow slow burn. What she wouldn’t do for an almost kiss with Special Agent Dale Cooper.

 

It happened so quickly, she thinks. Here she is dangling on that string. She thinks about his hand holding that string, each subtle turn and tilt sending her swaying this way and that. Would he like to watch her? The thought makes her flush again, heat radiating across her collarbone, and she spreads her hand there, feels the cold press of her ring. His hand on hers, how his thumb pinned her ring finger so he could inspect the diamond, it makes her shiver.

 

Just a taste, she wonders. What she wouldn’t give for just a taste.

 

God, she didn’t think anyone like that existed. For so long she was content to live inside her head, entertain her personal fantasies, dream up the kind of man she would fall for. Special Agent Dale Cooper didn’t even bat an eye at the strange things she said. Not like the others who met her eccentricities with confusion and suspicion. Special Agent Dale Cooper seemed to like them. He had quite a few of his own, ones that made her tickle inside. Just perfect, she thinks.

 

She almost wants there to be something wrong and kicks herself for the backtracking, the outright jinxing of her thoughts.

 

The air changes in the room, a chilling draft. She hears loafers cross the room to the record player. The needle skips and cuts off the melody. She keeps dancing, swaying with her eyes closed only briefly to prolong the moment. Her special agent retreats behind her eyes, fades to black, and all she is left with is Benjamin Horne. Audrey opens her eyes to the ceiling, feels the hot ice on her skin again. The dreamer disappears. The Cheshire cat settles in for the night.

 

“How many times have I asked you not to disturb the guests with this racket?”

 

Audrey rolls her eyes. “About 4000.” Smiles with all the mean-spirit she can muster, feels that evil little voice building up in the back of her mind. For a moment she thinks he is going to leave with just that, but that would be too easy. No, Benjamin Horne never leaves with just that, without getting one last lick in.

 

“Audrey.” She hears his footsteps approach. “Julie tells me that, uh, you were in with the Norwegians just before they all suddenly decided, en masse, to return to the old country.” He circles her once, towers over her, tries to make her feel small. It used to work. “Without signing the contracts. Is that true?” Her father the close talker, looking down on her. Audrey answers in the affirmative, and Ben nods like he expected this, of course. “You wouldn’t have done or said anything that might have precipitated their evacuation, would you?”

 

She knows he is milking it. He already knows the answer. He just wants to hear her say it, just wants an excuse to grind her down before he retreats back into benign neglect. “I mean, I’m assuming that this was just a coincidence, huh?” Perhaps she should let him think that instead, but she knows Julie must have told him.

 

Audrey folds her arms, refuses to speak to him directly. “Daddy, I did go in there to check out that ridiculous smorgasbord, and while I was in there, I happened to mention that I was sad.”

 

She hears her father turn at this. “About what?”

 

“About my dear close friend, Laura, being brutally murdered.”

 

“Do you realize the kind of money that your little performance cost this family?” She can just imagine him shaking his hand at her, a fist or a finger, something just as ineffectual, and she giggles softly to herself.

 

“If you ever.” What she doesn’t expect is the force with which he grabs her, shakes her. Her father is a tall man, a big-handed man. The look on his face, she knows he didn’t expect it either, knows it when he lets go of her suddenly, reduces himself to once again shaking his finger at her. “Pull another stunt like that, you are going to be scrubbing bidets in a Bulgarian convent!”

 

With his hands off her, she feels at liberty to offer a rebuttal. “Oh daddy, I’m so afraid.” She turns about face, holds herself a little closer this time, rubs her upper arms where his grip bit in.

 

“Laura died two days ago,” Ben says quietly. “I lost you years ago.” Even quieter. The door slams behind him.

 

She wishes somehow she could disappear and reappear like the Cheshire cat, all that’s left behind is that enigmatic smile for someone to ponder over, for someone to shiver over unnerved, perturbed, enamored. Just like that she appears before room 315, her balled up hand poised under the number plate to rap on the wood. It’s dark beneath the door, though. He must be asleep or still out hunting down Laura Palmer’s killer. Her mouth twists at this. He shouldn’t have to look too far, she thinks with not a little meanness.

 

She leans her forehead against the door, rubs it back and forth, whispers over and over like a mantra, like something to keep her safe from the bid bad uglies bubbling up inside her. “Special Agent Dale Cooper. Special Agent Dale Cooper.” She lightly knocks her head into the door, her palms flattening against the wood. “ _Special Agent Dale Cooper_.”


End file.
